One
of three brothers who played Division I football, Scott Plate, a
top-notch player at Columbia Central High School, got a full-ride
scholarship to the University of Iowa.

In 1991, he played in the Rose Bowl.

He
was well-liked. Coaches called him a good student, self-motivated and
hardworking, and he went on to play in the Canadian Football League. He got married, had three children and established a successful career in sales.

“He had it all going for him,” said Plate’s former wife, Katie Etue of Summit Township.

By
Feb. 3, Plate, 41, recently out of jail for failing to pay child
support, was living in the Jackson Interfaith Shelter on S. Blackstone
Street.

Problems with alcohol put him there, his father, Bill Plate, and others said.

“He’s been a good guy. He’s run on some hard times,” Bill Plate said last month.

Medical
records presented in court showed Scott Plate had a blood-alcohol level
of 0.358 percent when a witness said he called Justyn Ewing-Brown a
racial slur. He chest bumped the 20-year-old and the younger man punched
him, Ewing-Brown’s lawyer, Susan Dehncke said.

Plate fell to the ground and hit his head,
fracturing his skull. He was in a coma, had to have brain surgery and
spent about three weeks at the University of Michigan Medical Center in
Ann Arbor. Now, he is at a nursing and rehabilitation facility in Ohio.

With
many visitors and support, his recovery has been “pretty miraculous,”
Bill Plate of Bellevue, Ohio, said. He is walking, talking and
improving, but it is not clear what the long-term effects will be. “It’s
going to be a rocky road.”

Tuesday, Bill Plate was in Jackson County District Court for a preliminary examination in Ewing-Brown’s case.

Bill Plate said his son doesn’t seem to have any recollection of the events.

While some things are clear in his mind, he is a bit confused about time and places, his father said.

After the hearing, Assistant Prosecutor Everett Perry dropped the case.

The
prosecutor’s office would not have been able to successfully prosecute
it, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Mark Blumer said. “We thought there was a
viable claim of self-defense.”

Plate, who was listed at 5 foot 9 inches
and 190 pounds as a football player, is much bigger than Ewing-Brown.
Dehncke estimated Ewing-Brown is 5-5 and 140 pounds. Plate was
intimidating, she said.

Plate’s “extraordinary” level of
intoxication, almost 4.5 times the legal driving limit, might have
affected his response to the punch, Blumer said.

A future full of promise and football

If not for alcohol, Plate never would have gotten himself into such a situation, Bill Plate said.

Scott Plate had in the past been to a treatment program and attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, court records show.

He’s struggled, had success and failures, his father said.

“It is a tragedy,” Blumer said. “A person who clearly had such promise is being dragged down."

A proud part of a football family, Plate graduated from Columbia Central High School in 1989.

His
oldest brother, Todd Plate, already was on the University of Michigan
football team. Rick Plate, who graduated a year earlier, played at
Central Michigan University. Their cousin, Troy Plate, also played at
Michigan.

The four were close and competitive, according to past accounts.

“They
were all very good athletes,” said Gary Huntley, Columbia Central’s
varsity football coach in the 1980s, when all four Plates went to the
high school. “About as hard of workers as you could ever ask for.”

Scott Plate never got into trouble, he said. “His whole world, and his brothers’, was being an athlete.”

In
about 30 total years of coaching at several levels, Huntley said Scott
Plate probably was among the top 10 players he ever schooled.

A
quarterback and defensive back at Columbia Central, Scott Plate was
courted by all the Mid-American Conference schools and several Big Ten
Conference institutions, said Bob Elliott, former defensive backfield
coach at Iowa.

Elliott, now the safeties coach at the University
of Notre Dame, recruited Plate, and called him a tough, intelligent
player. He was self-motivated and reliable and did well academically.
“He was the kind of guy you wanted to coach.”

The standard was high in his family, which inspired Plate, Elliott said.

The Michigan game was big.

In
a 1990 story about the Michigan-Iowa rivalry, Todd and Scott Plate were
described as gritty and hard-hitting players who didn’t like to lose,
especially to one another.

“We’re both pretty hot-headed
individuals,” Todd Plate, who now lives in Tennessee, told the Citizen
Patriot in 1990. “When we were growing up, people didn’t really mess
with us too much.”

As hard as they fought against each other, the story said, they fought harder for each other.

Plate
started for three seasons and was a “huge contributor” at a time when
the team was successful, Elliott said. They went to the Holiday Bowl in
1991 and to the Rose Bowl the previous January. Scott Plate received a
ring for the Big Ten championship that got them to Pasadena.

The
ring, marked with the Rose Bowl emblem and Plate’s name, was stolen from
Plate as he walked in January from a downtown bar to the shelter. Three
people stopped him. He was struck in the side and one of the three took
it, Jackson Police Lt. Elmer Hitt said.

Detective Brett Stiles
has since found the ring at a local jeweler, where it had been pawned or
sold. No one was arrested in the case and unless new information
arises, the case is closed, Hitt said Thursday.

The January and February assaults are not believed to have been related, Hitt said.

Elliott and Huntley have not kept in regular contact with Plate.

“You
hear things. But you don’t want to believe half the stuff you hear,”
Huntley said when asked of Plate’s difficulties in recent years.

In
1994, after he graduated from Iowa, Plate signed a one-year free-agent
contract with the Vancouver British Columbia Lions. He played on and off
for two seasons, his father said.

The following year, he married
Katie Etue, according to court records. They had known each other since
they were 16, Etue said. She went with him to Iowa.

Together,
they had three children, now ages 10, 13, and 14, and she said he became
a successful salesman in the plastics industry.

Addiction takes its toll

For eight years,
he worked at Chicago-based MAUSER Group, an industrial packaging
producer, but lost the job because he refused to relocate, according to
information contained in his divorce filing. As of July 2008, he was
unemployed and the mortgage company had taken the family home.

His wife filed for divorce in May 2008. “It had something to do with the drinking,” Etue said last month.

In a letter to the
sentencing judge, Etue wrote Plate had turned around his life since the
September 2008 crash. He got sober, was working for a large company in
Indiana and “had his priorities in line,” she wrote.

It did not
stay that way. According to court records, he worked several different
jobs since 2008. Sometimes, he was unemployed and got into trouble for
failing to pay child support.

In December, a judge ordered him to pay $2,000 or spend 45 days in jail. He went to jail and was released in early January.

At the time of the assault, he had been at the shelter for what his father said was two or three weeks.

Plate
had stayed with family in the past, and Bill Plate, a plastics engineer
in the automotive industry, said he wanted his son to come home with
him and his stepmother in Bellevue, where Plate had earlier lived.

Plate’s children were in Jackson, and at his father’s house, there were rules.

“He
wanted to live his own lifestyle, whether we approved of it or not,”
Bill Plate said. “He wanted to have the freedom to make those
decisions.”

His troubles aside, Bill Plate said his son, who has helped with some high school teams, has a good heart and nature.

Since
the assault, the family has been pulling together for Scott Plate. He
had many visitors in the hospital, including former teammates.

“A lot of people have been praying for him,” Bill Plate said.

His children, who live with their mother, have been to see him, and he recognized them, Bill Plate said.

At
one point, his condition seemed dire. His family is glad he is alive,
said Bill Plate, who wanted to “kiss the nurse” when Scott Plate first
opened his eyes and said, “Dad.”